


i've come home, home, home

by milominderbinder



Series: maia's shameless fic a day in the month of may [18]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, M/M, Moving In Together, past angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-26 03:55:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1673777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milominderbinder/pseuds/milominderbinder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When Ian was five, he was living out of a van.  When Mickey was seven, his mom left his dad.  When Ian was twelve, Fiona left for a week, and it seemed like nothing was where it was supposed to be, even though nothing had moved.  When Mickey was fifteen, he thought that maybe, people like him weren't supposed to have homes.</i>
</p><p>Mickey and Ian get their first apartment together, and things are good, great, amazing.  But they haven't always been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i've come home, home, home

Mickey hesitates for a moment before he signs his name.

It’s not because he’s having second thoughts. It’s _not._ Ian’s stood by his side, which is about enough to dispel every single bad thought Mickey’s ever had - he can’t fuckin’ _wait_ to live with Ian, and signing this lease is the way to make that happen.  It’s not anything to do with the other person in the room, either, the landlord, who is some old hippie dude clearly too stoned out of his mind to give a fuck what’s going on in front of him.

It’s just that - well.

He realises he can’t wait any longer without making Ian suspicious, so he scribbles his name on the dotted line, right next to Ian’s.  He’d like to take a moment to appreciate the sight of their names together but he doesn't, instead trying to shove the piece of paper straight at the landlord, out of Ian's eyesight.

Of course, Mickey's made the mistake of dating a fucking ninja, so Ian snatches it away from him and is reading before Mickey can get in a single punch.

“ _Mykola!”_ Ian screeches, his face lighting up with joy.  Mickey groans, and covers his eyes.  “I _knew_ you were lying about being called Michael, I _knew_ it, you Ukranian motherfucker.”

Mickey has to laugh at that, even through his embarrassment. 

“Fuck off, Clayton,” he responds.  At least _he_ doesn’t have a middle name.  “You tell anyone, I’ll bust your balls, you get it?”

“Whatever you say, _Mykola_ ,” Ian responds.  The smug grin on his face is nearly enough to make Mickey punch him, except for the fact that all he _really_ wants to do is kiss him.

“You’re pronouncing it embarrassingly fuckin’ wrong, by the way.”

\--

When Ian was five, he was living out of a van.

Not by himself, of course.  Frank was there, in theory, though he often stayed out all night.  Fiona was there too, and she was the one who Ian counted on for being there when he needed someone, instead of his dad.  Lip, too.  Him and Ian were sharing a sleeping bag.

Debbie was just a baby, and she wasn’t with them.  Monica had run off with some other guy, and she’d taken Debbie with her, just a few months after she was born.  At the time, it had seemed like the worst thing Monica had ever done, taking away the baby sister Ian had loved more than anything - the only other one in the family with ginger hair, even if hers was only a tuft at that stage.

Of course, he didn’t know then that Monica and Debbie would be back within a month, and Monica would be knocked up again before anyone knew what was happening.

So, they were living out of this van.

Ian looked forward to going to school, and when school ended Lip would take Ian’s hand and lead him around the streets for hours, going to the park and stealing sweets from the store and watching baseball games at the dugouts.  They didn’t want to go home - they didn’t really feel like they had one.  It was winter; the van was cold.  The sleeping bag Ian shared with Lip did little to combat that, so the two of them hugged each other tight while they slept, and the body heat kept them warmer than the blankets.  Fiona had a duvet to herself, but she would still curl up next to them, wrap her body against Ian’s back, as close as she could go.  On the nights when Frank came back, he’d use the duvet, and Fiona would shiver, sleeping in her sweater and jeans.

Ian would always try and get her to take his space in the sleeping bag, but she never would.  Fiona was clever, and she was in middle school already, so Ian trusted that she knew the right thing to do.  It didn’t stop the churn of guilt in his stomach when he’d wake up to the sound of her teeth chattering, though.

\-- 

“Why we gotta have a blue fuckin’ bedroom?”

“Because blue’s my favourite colour, and when I asked you, you said we shouldn’t even bother painting.”

Mickey kicks at the can of paint on the floor, rolls his eyes.

“Still don’t see why we _are_ bothering.”

It’s Ian’s turn to roll his eyes, then.  He abandons the screwdriver he’d been using to try and open the paint, and takes a few quick steps towards Mickey, snagging him around the waist and nipping at his neck, growling playfully.  Mickey laughs as he half-heartedly tries to shove Ian away.

“Because it looks like shit,” Ian says, finally, as he pulls away.  “You really wanna sleep and fuck in a room that’s painted lemon yellow, with smoke stains and toddler crayon-doodles all over the walls?”

Ian has a point there, but Mickey’s still loathe to admit it, so he just shoves Ian away and stays quiet.  Ian laughs at him a little more before resuming his task of trying to open the paint.  When he finally gets the lid off the dented can, he pulls a couple of big paintbrushes out of the plastic bag from the hardware store, and starts to paint.  Mickey waits a moment before he joins in.

“Why the fuck you so obsessed with blue, anyway?” he grumbles, picking up a paintbrush and jabbing it hard against the wall.

“Because it’s the colour of your eyes, babe,” Ian says, adopting a simpering-sweet voice and leaning close, batting his eyelashes at Mickey.  He keeps it up for a few long seconds before Mickey shoves him away, and Ian bursts out laughing.

“Just shut up and paint, douche.”

\-- 

When Mickey was seven, his mom left his dad.

He didn’t see it coming.  They fought all the time, sure, but they’d been doing that his whole life and neither of them had ever left.  They hit each other and smashed things and yelled so loud Mickey was sure his ears would pop, so loud Mandy would come crying into his room in the middle of the night and the two of them would climb underneath his bed just to make things feel a little further away.  But, still.  Mickey never thought his mom would _leave._

He also didn’t think she’d take him with her.

But she did.  One night when Terry didn’t come home, she got out a big duffel bag and told him and Mandy and Iggy to pack three changes of clothes and their favourite toy.  When they did, she made them all hold hands, and led them out of the house.

Outside, there was a car waiting.  They all got inside.  In the driver’s seat was a friend of his mom’s that Mickey recognised, a woman who was maybe forty, and had bleached blonde hair with dark roots and needle marks in her arms and wore jean mini skirts so short Mickey could always see her underwear when she sat down.

Her name was Brandi, and for a month, Mickey and Mandy and Iggy and their mom lived in her apartment.

Her apartment was tiny and stuffy, and it was the middle of summer so they were always sweltering, hardly able to breathe through the combination of heat and the smoke from the cigarettes Brandi and his mom were always smoking together.  Mickey hated it there.  They weren’t allowed to watch the TV, and they weren’t allowed to make much noise during the day, because Brandi and his mom slept a lot.  Iggy was older, and he had friends from school who he was allowed to go out and see, but Mandy and Mickey had to stay there, all the time.

After a month, Mickey told Mandy they were going to run away.  She agreed blindly, just like she did to everything he said back then; they took the duffel bag with their clothes and Mandy’s two favourite toys in it, and they left, closing the door quietly so they wouldn’t wake up their mom, who was passed out on the kitchen floor.

They wandered the streets for hours before they ended up at the park.  They played on the swings and chased each other around, and it was nice, except once they’d eaten the sandwiches they’d brought with them, and it started to get dark, it was less nice, and more scary.

They went home only eight hours after leaving.  Their mom didn’t look worried when they came back in, but that night, they left Brandi’s apartment, and went home again.

Terry wasn’t there when they got back, but later that night, there was a lot of screaming.  Mandy and Mickey crawled under his bed, and he put his hands over her ears, and she cried.

He couldn’t decide if it was better or worse.

\--

Five minutes into assembling their shelves, Ian is already yelling at the instructions.

“Where the _fuck_ are the words?”

He then throws the paper against the wall, where it sticks to the still-drying paint for a moment, and then slides down to the floor.  Mickey has a feeling they won’t even be able to see the cryptic fucking pictures anymore, which is hardly gonna make things _easier._

“Calm down, princess,” Mickey says.  He rolls his eyes, and grabs the three different-sized screws out of Ian’s hands, holds them out in front of him.  “We can do this.  It’s a set of shelves from IKEA, for christ’s sake, not neuro-fucking-rocket science.”

“There’s no such thing as neuro rocket science,” Ian grumps.  “Unless rockets have _brains_ now, dick.”

Mickey just rolls his eyes, chooses one of the screws, and starts to screw it into the side of their shelf set.

Which prompts the three pieces of wood they’ve _actually_ managed to bang together to break apart again, and collapse onto the floor.

An hour later, the thing is almost assembled, except it’s leaning worryingly far to the right and they have five screws and one bracket left over, with no idea where to put them.  Mickey glares at the thing with all the intensity he possesses, trying to _will_ it into building itself, but Ian’s lying on the floor with his hands over his eyes, long past the point of defeat.

“Mickey, our shelves look _sad,_ ” he says.  “They look sad and wrong, I think we should put them out of their misery.  We can just pile our clothes up in the corner, it’ll be fine.”

“ _No,”_ Mickey hisses.  He stares down at the pile of wooden planks and inexplicable metal fixtures, a venomous passion in his eyes.  “We are _not_ getting beaten by a set of fuckin’ shelves. These shelves are gonna suck my _dick_ by the end of the night.”

\--

When Ian was twelve, Fiona left for a week.

It was just after she turned eighteen, and she had a new boyfriend who was twenty.  He had his own apartment, she’d told them all excitedly, and a motorcycle that he let her ride on the back of, and an actual job.  It was years later that Ian learned his _actual job_ was as a drug dealer; at the time, he’d just thought the guy sounded like the coolest boyfriend Fiona had ever had.

He quickly changed his mind when Fiona left for a week.

She called them, when she was already gone, to let them know she was gonna stay with her boyfriend for a little while.  And Ian couldn’t understand it.  His whole life, Frank and Monica had hardly seemed real to him, they’d been in and out so much, but Fiona - _Fiona,_ she was the rock, she was the only real thing he had that even resembled a parent.  She was the one who took care of them all.  He was closest to Lip, but really, he loved Fiona most.

She left, and it didn’t make sense, and for a whole week, his house didn’t feel like _home._ It felt like they were all floating aimlessly around, not knowing what to do, and nothing got done on time and Ian kept breaking things by accident.  It seemed like nothing was where it was supposed to be, even though nothing had moved.

Fiona came home sooner than he thought she would and still not soon enough.  Things felt better.  They still weren’t the same, though.

For the first time, Ian thought about the days when he would leave his family.  And he realised he didn’t _want_ to stay where he was forever.

\--

They unpack less than half their shit before they give up, and tumble down onto their mattress together.

They don’t have a bedframe yet, and their mattress is shitty and uncomfortable, but it’s a double so it’s more space than they’re used to at least - and most importantly, it’s _theirs,_ and theirs alone.  Just like their apartment is.  There’s no hordes of family threatening to walk in on them at any moment, they don’t have to be quiet, they don’t have to plan when and where they’re gonna fuck.  It’s somehow the safest Mickey has ever felt in his whole fucking life.

He rides Ian, slow and passionate, with their bedroom door wide open.  They talk the whole time, moan as loud as they like, laugh even louder.

“ _Mykola,”_ Ian keeps calling out, a shit eating grin on his face, then bursting into laughter. Mickey hits him on the chest every single time, but can’t even bring himself to be annoyed, really.  

“You still ain’t even close to pronouncing it right,” he huffs out in response, reaching down to shut Ian up with a kiss so deep it actually shuts down his brain for a minute.

Ian shouts when he comes, and Mickey twists his fingers into the sheets, laughing at the dumb look on Ian’s face.

\--

When Mickey was fifteen, Terry went to jail.  It wasn’t the first time, but it was the longest sentence he’d had since Mickey had been alive; a minimum of two years, but probably more, since Terry wasn’t exactly known for his good behaviour.

The night after the trial, when the stars were out and Mickey was lying in bed, trying to decide if he should jerk off or just go to sleep and get the whole awful day over with, Mandy came into his room.

“I found Dad’s weed,” she’d said, crossing the room to sit on the edge of his bed.  “Figured he won’t exactly miss it.”

That was back when she still called Terry _dad,_ back when Mickey did, too.

“Light’s in the bedside table,” he’d said, because a lot went unspoken between them, then.  He sat up as she rolled a joint, sloppily, like she didn’t really care.  She dug around in his dresser for a moment before producing a shitty old lighter which took a few flicks to produce a spark, but eventually the joint was lit, and they sat there together, smoking and watching the flickering streetlamp outside his window.

“D’you think we’ll ever have a home, Mickey?” she’d asked.  She was looking down at his duvet, busying her fingers with the joint, but he heard everything he needed to in the tone of her voice.  It seemed like a random question, but it wasn’t, he knew.  Him and Mandy had too much in common for him to be fooled by her attempts at seeming casual.

“You’re fuckin’ sat in it, Mands,” he’d replied.

“Well, sure, this is our _house,”_ she’d said, passing him the joint and rubbing at her eyes.  “But that’s not what I fuckin’ asked.  Do you think we’ll ever have a _home?_ ”

“Our house is our home, Mandy, shut the fuck up,” he’d said.

He’d only said it because he knew the real answer was _no._

Mickey wasn’t sure people like him were supposed to have homes.  People like him weren’t supposed to have a safe place to land.

\--

“Mickey.”

Mickey grunts, doesn’t open his eyes.  His face is buried in the soft skin of Ian’s shoulder, and he’s wrapped up in their worn old sheets, and he’s pretty much seconds away from falling into what he’s pretty sure will be the best sleep of his life.

“ _Mickey,”_ Ian hisses again, more insistent this time, shoving against Mickey’s shoulder.  Mickey groans, and leans up on his elbows, opens his eyes so he can stare at Ian.

“What, man?” he asks through a yawn.  His eyes already feel like they’re drooping again.

“Mickey, we might have just given half of Chicago a free show.”

Mickey’s eyebrows shoot up.  That was _not_ what he was expecting to hear.  It takes him a moment to realise that Ian’s not looking at him, but rather at something over his shoulder; Mickey quickly spins around to see what it is, and then freezes.

“God _damn it,”_ he groans, letting his eyes fall closed again, this time from annoyance rather than exhaustion.  “I knew there was something we forgot.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then they both say it at the same time, their voices tinged with the same amount of resigned horror.

“Fucking _curtains.”_

**Author's Note:**

> written for the fic a day in may challenge, and also kinda for tylerduns who asked for 'anything heartbreaking'. THIS IS THE CLOSEST I CAN DO TO ANGST OOPS.
> 
> send me prompts on tumblr:[mickeymilk](http://mickeymilk.tumblr.com)


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